Isaiah 26:5-11; The Goodness and Justice of God; “for when Thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness”; He will make humble souls that trust in Him to triumph over their proud enemies; Those that exalt themselves shall be abased; Note, Those that are enemies to God’s people, and envy them, God looks upon as His enemies, and will deal with them accordingly. B.C. 718

Isaiah 26:5-11

5 For he bringeth down them that dwell on high; the lofty city, he layeth it low; he layeth it low, even to the ground; he bringeth it even to the dust.   6 The foot shall tread it down, even the feet of the poor, and the steps of the needy.   7 The way of the just is uprightness: thou, most upright, dost weigh the path of the just.   8 Yea, in the way of thy judgments, O LORD, have we waited for thee; the desire of our soul is to thy name, and to the remembrance of thee.   9 With my soul have I desired thee in the night; yea, with my spirit within me will I seek thee early: for when thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.   10 Let favour be showed to the wicked, yet will he not learn righteousness: in the land of uprightness will he deal unjustly, and will not behold the majesty of the LORD.   11 LORD, when thy hand is lifted up, they will not see: but they shall see, and be ashamed for their envy at the people; yea, the fire of thine enemies shall devour them.

Here the prophet further encourages us to trust in the Lord for ever, and to continue waiting on him; for,

I. He will make humble souls that trust in him to triumph over their proud enemies, v. 5, 6. Those that exalt themselves shall be abased: For he brings down those that dwell on high; and wherein they deal proudly he is, and will be, above them. Even the lofty city Babylon itself, or Nineveh, he lays it low, ch. 25:12. He can do it, be it ever so well fortified. He has often done it. He will do it, for he resists the proud. It is his glory to do it, for he proves himself to be God by looking on the proud and abasing them, Job 40:12. But, on the contrary, those that humble themselves shall be exalted; for the feet of the poor shall tread upon the lofty cities, v. 6. He does not say, Great armies shall tread them down; but, When God will have it done, even the feet of the poor shall do it, Mal. 4:3. You shall tread down the wicked. Come, set your feet on the necks of these kings. See Ps. 147:6; Rom. 16:20.

II. He takes cognizance of the way of his people and has delight in it (v. 7): The way of the just is evenness (so it may be read): it is their endeavour and constant care to walk with God in an even steady course of obedience and holy conversation. My foot stands in an even place, goes in an even path, Ps. 26:12. And it is their happiness that God makes their way plain and easy before them: Thou, most upright, dost level (or make even) the path of the just, by preventing or removing those things that would be stumbling-blocks to them, so that nothing shall offend them, Ps. 119:165. God weighs it (so we read it); he considers it, and will give them grace sufficient for them, to help them over all the difficulties they may meet with in their way. Thus with the upright God will show himself upright.

III. It is our duty, and will be our comfort, to wait for God, and to keep up holy desires towards him in the darkest and most discouraging times, v. 8, 9. This has always been the practice of God’s people, even when God has frowned upon them,

1. To keep up a constant dependence upon him: “In the way of thy judgments we have still waited for thee; when thou hast corrected us we have looked to no other hand than thine to relieve us,” as the servant looks only to the hand of his master, till he have mercy upon him, Ps. 123:2. We cannot appeal from God’s justice but to his mercy. If God’s judgments continue long, if it be a road of judgments (so the word signifies), yet we must not be weary but continue waiting.

2. To send up holy desires towards him. Our troubles, how pressing soever, must never put us out of conceit with our religion, nor turn us away from God; but still the desire of our soul must be to his name and to the remembrance of him; and in the night, the darkest longest night of affliction, with our souls must we desire him.

(1.) Our great concern must be for God’s name, and our earnest desire must be that his name may be glorified, whatever becomes of us and our names. This is that which we must wait for, and pray for. “Father, glorify thy name, and we are satisfied.”

(2.) Our great comfort must be in the remembrance of that name, of all that whereby God has made himself known. The remembrance of God must be our great support and pleasure; and, though sometimes we be unmindful of him, yet still our desire must be towards the remembrance of him and we must take pains with our own hearts to have him always in mind.

(3.) Our desires towards God must be inward, fervent, and sincere. With our soul we must desire him, with our soul we must pant after him (Ps. 42:1), and with our spirits within us, with the innermost thought and the closest application of mind, we must seek him. We make nothing of our religion, whatever our profession be, if we do not make heart-work of it.

(4.) Even in the darkest night of affliction our desires must be towards God, as our sun and shield; for, however God is pleased to deal with us, we must never think the worse of him, nor cool in our love to him.

(5.) If our desires be indeed towards God, we must give evidence that they are so by seeking him, and seeking him early, as those that desire to find him, and dread the thoughts of missing him. Those that would seek God and find him must seek betimes, and seek him earnestly. Though we come ever so early, we shall find him ready to receive us.

IV. It is God’s gracious design, in sending abroad his judgments, thereby to bring men to seek him and serve him: When thy judgments are upon the earth, laying all waste, then we have reason to expect that not only God’s professing people, but even the inhabitants of the world, will learn righteousness, will have their mistakes rectified and their lives reformed, will be brought to acknowledge God’s righteousness in punishing them, will repent of their own unrighteousness in offending God, and so be brought to walk in right paths. They will do this; that is, judgments are designed to bring them to this, they have a natural tendency to produce this effect, and, though many continue obstinate, yet some even of the inhabitants of the world will profit by this discipline, and will learn righteousness; surely they will; they are strangely stupid if they do not.

Note, The intention of afflictions is to teach us righteousness; and blessed is the man whom God chastens, and thus teaches, Ps. 94:12. Discite justitiam, moniti, et non temnere divos–Let this rebuke teach you to cultivate righteousness, and cease from despising the gods.–Virgil.

V. Those are wicked indeed that will not be wrought upon by the favourable methods God takes to subdue and reform them; and it is necessary that God should deal with them in a severe way by his judgments, which shall prevail to humble those that would not otherwise be humbled. Observe,

1. How sinners walk contrary to God, and refuse to comply with the means used for their reformation and to answer the intentions of them, v. 10.

(1.) Favour is shown to them. They receive many mercies from God; he causes his sun to shine and his rain to fall upon them, nay, he prospers them, and into their hands he brings plentifully; they escape many of the strokes of God’s judgments, which others less wicked than they have been cut off by; in some particular instances they seem to be remarkably favoured above their neighbours, and the design of all this is that they may be won upon to love and serve that God who thus favours them; and yet it is all in vain: They will not learn righteousness, will not be led to repentance by the goodness of God, and therefore it is requisite that God should send his judgments into the earth, to reckon with men for abused mercies.

(2.) They live in a land of uprightness, where religion is professed and is in reputation, where the word of God is preached, and where they have many good examples set them,–in a land of evenness, where there are not so many stumbling-blocks as in other places,–in a land of correction, where vice and profaneness are discountenanced and punished; yet there they will deal unjustly, and go on frowardly in their evil ways. Those that do wickedly deal unjustly both with God and man, as well as with their own souls; and those that will not be reclaimed by the justice of the nation may expect the judgments of God upon them. Nor can those expect a place hereafter in the land of blessedness who now conform not to the laws and usages, nor improve the privileges and advantages, of the land of uprightness; and why do they not? It is because they will not behold the majesty of the Lord, will not believe, will not consider, what a God of terrible majesty he is whose laws and justice they persist in the contempt of. God’s majesty appears in all the dispensations of his providence; but they regard it not, and therefore study not to answer the ends of those dispensations. Even when we receive of the mercy of the Lord we must still behold the majesty of the Lord and his goodness.

(3.) God lifts up his hand to give them warning, that they may, by repentance and prayer, make their peace with him; but they take no notice of it, are not aware that God is angry with them, or coming forth against them: They will not see, and none so blind as those who will not see, who shut their eyes against the clearest conviction of guilt and wrath, who ascribe that to chance, or common fate, which is manifestly a divine rebuke, who regard not the threatening symptoms of their own ruin, but cry Peace to themselves, when the righteous God is waging war with them.

2. How God will at length be too hard for them; for, when he judges, he will overcome: They will not see, but they shall see, shall be made to see, whether they will or no, that God is angry with them. Atheists, scorners, and the secure, will shortly feel what now they will not believe, that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. They will not see the evil of sin, and particularly the sin of hating and persecuting the people of God; but they shall see, by the tokens of God’s displeasure against them for it and the deliverances in which God will plead his people’s cause, that what is done against them he takes as done against himself and will reckon for it accordingly. They shall see that they have done God’s people a great deal of wrong, and therefore shall be ashamed of their enmity and envy towards them, and their ill usage of such as deserved better treatment.

Note, Those that bear ill-will to God’s people have reason to be ashamed of it, so absurd and unreasonable is it; and, sooner or later, they shall be ashamed of it, and the remembrance of it shall fill them with confusion. Some read it, They shall see and be confounded for the zeal of the people, by the zeal God will show for his people; when they shall be made to know how jealous God is for the honour and welfare of his people they shall be confounded to think that they might have been of that people and would not. Their doom therefore is that, since they slighted the happiness of God’s friends, the fire of his enemies shall devour them, that is, the fire which is prepared for his enemies and with which they shall be devoured, the fire designed for the devil and his angels. Note, Those that are enemies to God’s people, and envy them, God looks upon as his enemies, and will deal with them accordingly.

-          Matthew Henry Commentary

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Isaiah 26:1-4;The Blessings of the Gospel; “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee: because he trusteth in thee; Trust ye in the LORD for ever: for in the LORD JEHOVAH is everlasting strength”; Those that trust in God shall not only find in Him, but receive from Him, everlasting strength, strength that will carry them to everlasting life. B.C. 718

I S A I A H.

CHAPTER 26

Isaiah 26:1-4

1 In that day shall this song be sung in the land of Judah; We have a strong city; salvation will God appoint for walls and bulwarks.   2 Open ye the gates, that the righteous nation which keepeth the truth may enter in.   3 Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.   4 Trust ye in the LORD for ever: for in the LORD JEHOVAH is everlasting strength:

To the prophecies of gospel grace very fitly is a song annexed, in which we may give God the glory and take to ourselves the comfort of that grace: In that day, the gospel day, which the day of the victories and enlargements of the Old-Testament church was typical of (to some of which perhaps this has a primary reference), in that day this song shall be sung; there shall be persons to sing it, and cause and hearts to sing it; it shall be sung in the land of Judah, which was a figure of the gospel church; for the gospel covenant is said to be made with the house of Judah, Heb. 8:8. Glorious things are here said of the church of God.

I. That it is strongly fortified against those that are bad (v. 1): We have a strong city. It is a city incorporated by the charter of the everlasting covenant, fitted for the reception of all that are made free by that charter, for their employment and entertainment; it is a strong city, as Jerusalem was, while it was a city compact together, and had God himself a wall of fire round about it, so strong that none would have believed that an enemy could ever enter into the gates of Jerusalem, Lam. 4:12. The church is a strong city, for it has walls and bulwarks, or counterscarps, and those of God’s own appointing; for he has, in his promise, appointed salvation itself to be its defence. Those that are designed for salvation will find that to be their protection, 1 Pet. 1:4.

II. That it is richly replenished with those that are good, and they are instead of fortifications to it; for the inhabitants of Jerusalem, if they are such as they should be, are its strength, Zech. 12:5. The gates are here ordered to be opened, that the righteous nation, which keeps the truth, may enter in, v. 2. They had been banished and driven out by the iniquity of the former times, but now the laws that were made against them are repealed, and they have liberty to enter in again. Or, There is an act for a general naturalization of all the righteous, whatever nation they are of, encouraging them to come and settle in Jerusalem. When God has done great things for any place or people he expects that thus they should render according to the benefit done unto them; they should be kind to his people, and take them under their protection and into their bosom. Note,

1. It is the character of righteous men that they keep the truths of God, a firm belief of which will have a commanding influence upon the regularity of the whole conversation. Good principles fixed in the head will produce good resolutions in the heart and good practices in the life.

2. It is the interest of states to countenance such, and court them among them, for they bring a blessing with them.

III. That all who belong to it are safe and easy, and have a holy security and serenity of mind in the assurance of God’s favour.

1. This is here the matter of a promise (v. 3): Thou wilt keep him in peace, peace, in perfect peace, inward peace, outward peace, peace with God, peace of conscience, peace at all times, under all events; this peace shall he be put into, and kept in the possession of, whose mind is stayed upon God, because it trusts in him. It is the character of every good man that he trusts in God, puts himself under his guidance and government, and depends upon him that it shall be greatly to his advantage to do so. Those that trust in God must have their minds stayed upon him, must trust him at all times, under all events, must firmly and faithfully adhere to him, with an entire satisfaction in him; and such as do so God will keep in perpetual peace, and that peace shall keep them. When evil tidings are abroad those shall calmly expect the event, and not be disturbed by frightful apprehensions arising from them, whose hearts are fixed, trusting in the Lord, Ps. 112:7.

2. It is the matter of a precept (v. 4): “Let us make ourselves easy by trusting in the Lord for ever; since God has promised peace to those that stay themselves upon him, let us not lose the benefit of that promise, but repose an entire confidence in him. Trust in him for ever, at all times, when you have nothing else to trust to; trust in him for that peace, that portion, which will be for ever.” Whatever we trust to the world for, it will be but for a moment: all we expect from it is confined within the limits of time. But what we trust in God for will last as long as we shall last. For in the Lord Jehovah-Jah, Jehovah, in him who was, and is, and is to come, there is a rock of ages, a firm and lasting foundation for faith and hope to build upon; and the house built on that rock will stand in a storm. Those that trust in God shall not only find in him, but receive from him, everlasting strength, strength that will carry them to everlasting life, to that blessedness which is for ever; and therefore let them trust in him for ever, and never cast away nor change their confidence.

-          Matthew Henry Commentary

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Learning the Work Ethnic Young

From American Thinker.Com

July 29, 2011

By David Paulin

In America’s rural Midwest, an annual ritual is underway in the vast cornfields that stretch to the horizon.  Thousands of American teenagers, in a rite of passage, are doing the kinds of farm work more commonly performed by visitors from South of the Border.  

The teens are detasseling seed corn.

Going from one stalk to another under the blazing sun, they yank off the uppermost tassels in various rows.  Some detasselers walk their rows.  Others ride in baskets extending from tractors.

It’s exhausting work — dirty and sweaty.  But poor and uneducated migrant laborers are nowhere to be found in most fields.  Rather, it’s fresh-faced rural teens, usually 13 to 15.  They do this work to earn extra money over their summer vacations.  What’s more, in the rural Midwest detasseling is regarded as a character-building experience.

Scrapes, sunburns, and twisted ankles are the worst things that usually befall the young detasselers, boys and girls employed by subcontractors for giant seed companies.  It’s unheard of to have serious accidents.  But last Monday, a freak accident in Illinois claimed the lives of two 14-year-old detasselers, Jade Garza and Hannah Kendall, both of Sterling, Illinois.  They were electrocuted near an above-ground irrigation system.  Two fellow female detasselers, both sisters, also were injured in the water-soaked field by an electrical current.

Jade Garza and and Hannah Kendall were best friends, and their tragic deaths are getting prominent news coverage in newspapers in the Midwest.  A Facebook page set up for the girls quickly received 11,000-plus tributes to the teens.

The accident also has called attention to the epic effort each summer to detassel seed corn that, due to culture and custom in the Midwest, is reserved exclusively for young teens.

In some parts of the country, many middle- and upper-middle-class teens spend their summers doing fancy internships.  But not in the rural Midwest.  There, large numbers of teens eagerly work as detasselers, a job they proudly list in their resumes, and that many of their parents also did as teens.

Not long after dawn, the young detasselers cheerfully ride in buses that take them from staging areas to outlying cornfields.

By 6 or 7 a.m., they’re in the thick of dew-covered stalks.  To stay dry, they wear ponchos or cut-out plastic garbage bags over their heads, removing them as the sun burns off the dew and the fields heat up.

It’s a ritual that’s now in high gear.  By detasseling some rows of corn, other rows planted with different seeds will cross-pollinate the detasseled stalks, producing hybrid seeds commanding high prices.

The detasseling season lasts a few short weeks — but the pride and work ethic it instills in rural youngsters benefits them for a lifetime, say current and former detasselers.

To be sure, rural youngsters detasseling corn are nothing like the migrant laborers one might associate with grueling agricultural work.  On the contrary, they are middle-class kids.  And they are overwhelmingly white, a fact reflecting rural America’s demographics.

Detasseling is the first job many rural teens have, and they’re proud of that fact.  The CEO and executive vice president of Country Financial, Barb Baurer, proudly lists her very first job in high school: corn detasseling.

“Fancy internships don’t reflect the work ethic that you learn in a cornfield,” wrote Mary Gustafson in an article fondly recalling her days of detasseling as a young teen.  When not working in the cornfields, she worked in her family’s True Value hardware store.  Her father pushed her into corn detasseling for her own good, brushing aside her desire to spend the summer writing a novel.

Detasselers earn up to $1,300 or more for a few weeks of work — a small fortune for young teens in junior high or high school.  Most couldn’t earn that much money at other jobs available to teens who are less than 17.  Fast-food restaurants, after all, don’t generally hire kids who are 13, 14, and 15.  Rural teens who work as detasselers are thus getting their first taste of financial independence and pride in hard work.  In many cases, the young teens are supervised by college students who themselves started working as detasselers as young teens.

For the thousands of teens now working the fields in America’s corn belt, the deaths of two of their own has darkened a detasseling season that is normally filled with camaraderie and good times, as is reflected in the amusing YouTube clips some make to celebrate a special time of their lives.  In one, detasselers dance in the corn fields to pop music; another features a busload of detasselers enjoying an impromptu drum solo from a fellow detasseler.

Writing on the Facebook page dedicated to the two teenage detasselers and best friends who died in an Illinois cornfield, Sheri Reimers-Smith wrote: “My thoughts and prayers go out to all family and friends due to this accident. An accident that will never be forgotten and a community that has pulled together to comfort one another. R.I.P. sweet angels. You are both in wonderful hands! Praying for strength to help deal with such a tragedy.”

For the teenage detasselers now in the fields, this season will be bittersweet.

Below is a 3 minute YouTube video on detasseling, of a certain charm.

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons and Team Corn & Soil Inc.

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Grace for today

Deuteronomy 33:25
As thy days, so shall thy strength be –

We must never rely upon the spiritual experience of yesterday, but on the promised grace for each new day.

You see, each day is different.

There are new people we have to meet; there are new situations we have to face; there are new problems to overcome. And yesterday’s grace will not suffice.

We must learn to trust God for the day in which we are living now.

Said an old lady, some months ago, to a certain preacher, ‘I must make this confession, sir. I am seventy-five years of age, and I have been a Christian for fifty years, but I am terribly afraid to die.’

Said the minister quietly to her, ‘I would not worry about that if I were you. Because all the time that you are alive, God will give you living grace; and you needn’t be concerned about dying, while God gives you living grace.

But the moment that your ministry here is ended, and God seeks to take you into His presence, then He will cease giving you living grace, and He will begin to give you dying grace; and then you will want to go to Him.’

That was a great comfort to the old lady. But there is a truth in it for us, because there are people who are not getting the blessing that God intended them to have through the ministry of His Word, simply because they are anxious about a certain set of circumstances which they have to face in the immediate future, and they have not learned the lesson of trusting God for each new day. – John L. Bird, Deliverance From Self-Despair, 1961
- Daily Thoughts from Keswick.

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Overexposure is Dangerous for Gays and Jews

From American Thinker.Com

July 29, 2011

By Robert Oscar Lopez

As Mike Bates at NewsBusters points out, gay-themed news stories have reached an absurd prominence lately.  He was flummoxed by the amount of time devoted by Don Lemon (CNN) to same-sex marriages in New York:

Lemon devoted most of the hour-long program to stories of men marrying men and women marrying women.  Less than ten minutes were spent on a potential debt ceiling deal in Washington.  The Norwegian tragedy warranted about four minutes of air time.

It has been almost a month since New York’s legislature passed the law.  Voilà: Gay News Overload Syndrome.

Barack Obama finally signed the certification for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal, to great fanfare, with new volleys from the one-track-minded Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which now vows that its fight is far from over:

“Signing legislation that allows for repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ was necessary, but it is not sufficient for ensuring equality in the military,” said Sarvis.

Judging from his call to war, we can look forward to more human-interest stories from the Associated Press with cherry-picked quotes at hot spots close to Camp Lejeune and Edwards Air Force Base.

The gay mill never stops.  Last March, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) introduced the Respect for Marriage Act, and on July 19, Barack Obama suddenly supported it, which led to hours of deliberation about gay marriage on the Senate floor even as talks between Congress and the president about the debt ceiling went nowhere.

Meanwhile, a lawsuit is filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center against the Annoka-Hennepin School District over its failure to affirm homosexuality in the classroom.

In the Midwest, controversy still boils about Michele and Marcus Bachmann’s clinic, causing a group of homosexuals to dress up like barbarians and attack the Minnesota counseling office with glitter.  Conservative gay leader Chris Barron asks the gay left to calm down, which leads to an angry pushback in the Advocate from Lucas Grindley.

Controversy lingers over Dan Savage’s and Jon Stewart’s childish accusations that Marcus Bachmann is a closeted homosexual.  Dan Savage admits on Bill Maher’s set that he fantasizes about raping Rick Santorum until a frothy fluid leaks out of the latter’s orifices.  The next day, Dan Savage claims he was drunk when he said all Republicans should die, but it is too late, because Rick Santorum goes on the radio to condemn Dan Savage for his “filth.”

This is, by the way, the Dan Savage chosen by the organizers of New York City’s Gay Pride Parade to serve as Grand Marshall.  He has custody of an adopted son.  (Would I approve of an adoption agency giving custody of a little girl to a straight man who got drunk, lost control of what he was saying, and went on national television to admit he fantasized about raping a famous woman until fluids leaked out of her?)

California makes more gay news, requiring that social studies classes in public schools celebrate the achievements of gays in history, which means we all have to get ready for quiz questions like “did Walt Whitman come out to his parents?” and “was Juvenal’s Second Satire about ex-gays or leather daddies?”

Even the most tolerant person on Earth must feel the urge to scream: Enough!

In most studies, sociologists estimate that gays and lesbians make up around 2% of the adult population.  Most attention involves gay men rather than lesbians anyway.  Why the overload?

A Brief History Lesson

Galvanized after 1969, gays and lesbians broke with thousands of years of history to turn what was classified as a mental disorder into a respected identity.  In the late 1980s and 1990s, confronted with AIDs, organizers following the strategy of Gay Men’s Health Crisis built a national infrastructure of community centers, volunteer agencies, and local clinics, for which they may take stellar credit.

But a rival movement based on the philosophy of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACTUP) exploited the public’s morbid fascination with gay scandal and ended up monopolizing media attention.  The ACTUP slogan of the early 1990s was “Silence=Death.”  For ACTUP, visibility was key and the greatest danger was to be unmentioned.  ACTUP’s temperament predominated and the movement became obsessed with getting in the news by pushing legislation and provoking high-profile court cases.

The New Blacks or the New Jews?

I made it clear on my website that a boomerang risk looms large for gays.  To get a sense of how overexposure can backfire, consider the widespread coverage devoted to Jewish issues circa 2006.  That summer all I saw on CNN at the gym, and all I heard on talk radio, was Jewish news.  There was a war between Israel and Hezb’allah; Democrats and Republicans were competing with each to show their devotion to Israel, lest they appear weak in the upcoming midterms.  Mel Gibson was stopped by the police and went on an anti-Semitic rant; this got more coverage than Dan Savage gets today.  Back then, Elie Wiesel was still quoted often in public discourse; Holocaust films like The Pianist had been sweeping awards ceremonies for the better part of a decade, leading Spike Lee to make the controversial statement, “for a period of over 10 years, almost every film that won best feature-length documentary was about the Holocaust,” for which there was a round of recriminations, accusations, and mea culpas.

Then came the publication of The Israel Lobby.  John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt presented theses that would have seemed like heresy only a few years earlier, such as that only the Israel “lobby has managed to divert [discussion] as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country — in this case, Israel — are essentially identical,” and “the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.”

Because John Mearsheimer was a professor at the University of Chicago, his slam on the so-called “Israel lobby” was difficult to dismiss as Mel Gibsonesque anti-Semitic rantings.

The notion of a Jewish cabal of power-brokers manipulating American foreign policy is rather hyperbolic, but it went from being verboten to a sine qua non among many on the left, including a great many Jewish liberals.  The illusion of an all-powerful Israel lobby made phony resistance to said lobby all the sexier.  In 2010, an organization called “Jews against Apartheid” organized a conference in Detroit, Michigan, with the explicit goal “to overcome Zionism and decolonize Palestine.”

The crescendo for me was the Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide Conference, where I unwisely presented work on multiculturalism in the military.  One of the plenaries culminated in David Lloyd goading a gymnasium full of radicals from every part of the globe to unite against Israel — not to rest until boycotts, divestments, and sanctions finally ended the state entirely.  My Jewish friend, sitting beside me, had a panic attack when hordes of people of color all but screamed for Jewish blood.  I drove him back to his hotel room.  He popped Xanax.  Crying, he told me, “They always turn on us.”  This was hosted by the University of California at Riverside, a state-supported institution.

Not long afterwards, the University of Johannesburg’s academic senate voted to cut ties to Ben-Gurion University in what many academics viewed as the start of a potentially crippling blockade of Israeli colleges.  American intellectuals such as Judith Butler signed the petition.

How did things change so quickly?

I would suggest that there was no cabal commanding the press to push aside important news for human-interest stories about gays or Jews.

For emotional reasons, both Jews and gays have served as vehicles for liberal Democrats to show their generosity.  Once these small groups engaged the two-party system and implicitly picked a side, they became a card played in rhetorical wars that often had nothing to do with them.  The Jews then felt a backlash which they were not prepared for.  Small in number, both in the Middle East and in the United States, Jews never had the all-encompassing power that the public at large imputed to them.

Gays beware.  While it may seem that sympathy runs high for homosexual causes right now, people will start to feel annoyed.  They will ask, why should I care?  Or even worse: Why are gays constantly demanding that I care?  And then comes the closer scrutiny of the movement’s claims, which can lead to a dramatic reversal akin to what happened with public support for Israel.  The gay cause depends on scientists at some point proving that homosexuality is an innate trait that cannot be modified; for if this claim is disproved, then gay is no longer what you are but what you choose to do, and there is no gay constituency for gay activists to fight for.  Like Israel, gays enter rhetoric with their entire existential claims vulnerable.

Up until now, it has been a sacred code among leftists never to question the axiom, “I was born this way.”  But see what Gary Greenburg writes in the leftist Mother Jones today: “If science proves sexual orientation is more fluid than we’ve been led to believe, can homosexuality still be a protected right?”  You don’t ask questions like that unless you know the answer.

Much can unravel.  Everyday Americans, even Democrats, will not take long to notice how white, male, and privileged the gay activist leadership is.  Soon they will wonder whether gay adoption is a good idea, should it become a mercantile system designed to meet the needs of wealthy but childless gay men rather than a last-resort solution for needy orphans.  Then they will start to ask themselves if marriage equality laws and the Tyler Clementi Act are a bit intrusive — even unconstitutional — and they will feel that they’ve been duped by a “Gay Lobby” into surrendering their free speech and enabling an exploitative system of surrogacy and trafficking of infants.  Alas, they may one day wake up and say, “They lied to me.”  When that day comes, run for the hills.

Robert Oscar Lopez is the author of The Colorful Conservative: American Conversations with the Ancients from Wheatley to Whitman (Rowman & Littlefield’s University Press of America, 2011). He can be found at www.colorfulconservative.com.

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Jihad Watch: News Index – 29th July 2011

From Jihad Watch.Org

July 28, 2011

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Pajamas Media: News Index – 29th July 2011

From Pajamas Media.Com

DIGEST Friday July 29, 2011

Recommend Your Solution to the U.S. Deficit with the PJ Modeling tool

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Red States, Including the ‘Newly-Reds,’ Excel at Job Growth

by Tom Blumer

But for them, the U.S. economy might already be in another recession.

READ

After Norway Massacre, the Debate Will Go On

by David Solway

The conservative argument against multiculturalism will not be silenced.

READ

Gunwalker: William Newell Circles the Wagons

by Patrick Richardson

Tuesday’s hearing put the ATF special agent under the microscope, and he revealed as little as possible.

READ

Three Ways To Tell If North Korea Is Serious About Giving Up Nukes

by Claudia Rosett

It is time to stop endlessly chasing after fantasies of North Korean good faith that doesn’t exist.

READ

Truth in Advertising: Cowboys & Aliens Does in Fact Offer Cowboys and Aliens

by John Boot

The director of Iron Man offers a reasonably entertaining summer popcorn flick.

READ

‘Holding Pattern’: House Delays Vote on Boehner Plan, Vote Counting Continues (Update: No Vote Tonight)

by Bryan Preston

The brink.

READ

Fort Hood UPDATE: Abdo Confesses to Planning Attack, Bought Uniform and Fort Hood Unit Patches Off-Base

by Bryan Preston

Alert gun store owners, police thwart terrorist.

READ

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Jewish Boycott vs Muslim World/Medicine

Jewish  Boycott

Well  done: This may very well end the Muslim problems. A short time  ago, Iran ‘s Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged the  Muslim World to boycott anything and everything that originates with  the Jewish people.   In response,  Meyer M. Treinkman, a pharmacist, out of the kindness of his heart,  offered to assist them in their boycott as follows:

“Any Muslim  who has Syphilis must not be cured by Salvarsan discovered by a Jew,  Dr. Ehrlich. He should not even try to find out whether he has  Syphilis, because the Wasserman Test is the discovery of a Jew. If a  Muslim suspects that he has Gonorrhea, he must not seek diagnosis,  because he will be using the method of a Jew named  Neissner.

“A Muslim  who has heart disease must not use Digitalis, a discovery by a Jew,  Ludwig Traube. Should he  suffer with a toothache, he must not use Novocaine, a discovery of  the Jews, Widal and Weil.     If a Muslim  has Diabetes, he must not use Insulin, the result of research by  Minkowsky, a Jew.   If one has a  headache, he must shun Pyramidon and Antypyrin, due to the Jews,  Spiro and Ellege.

Muslims with  convulsions must put up with them because it was a Jew, Oscar  Leibreich, who proposed the use of Chloral Hydrate.     Arabs must  do likewise with their psychic ailments because Freud, father of  psychoanalysis, was a Jew.   Should a  Muslim child get Diphtheria, he must refrain from the “Schick”  reaction which was invented by the Jew, Bella Schick.

“Muslims  should be ready to die in great numbers and must not permit  treatment of ear and brain damage, work of Nobel Prize winner,  Robert Baram.   They should  continue to die or remain crippled by Infantile Paralysis because  the discoverer of the anti-polio vaccine is a Jew, Jonas  Salk.

“Muslims  must refuse to use Streptomycin and continue to die of Tuberculosis  because a Jew, Zalman Waxman, invented the wonder drug against this  killing disease.   Muslim  doctors must discard all discoveries and improvements by  dermatologist Judas Sehn Benedict, or the lung specialist, Frawnkel,  and of many other world renowned Jewish scientists and medical  experts.

“In short,  good and loyal Muslims properly and fittingly should remain  afflicted with Syphilis, Gonorrhea, Heart Disease, Headaches,  Typhus, Diabetes, Mental Disorders, Polio, Convulsions and  Tuberculosis and be proud to obey the Islamic boycott.”     Meanwhile I  ask, what medical contributions to the world have the Muslims  made?

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For behold, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations and cause it to move to and fro as grain is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least kernel fall upon the earth and be lost [from My sight]; And I will bring back the exiles of My people Israel, and they shall build the waste cities and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards and drink the wine from them; they shall also make gardens and eat the fruit of them; And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be torn up out of their land which I gave them, says the Lord your God

Amos 9:1-15

¹I SAW the Lord standing at the altar, and He said, Smite the tops of the pillars until the thresholds tremble, and shatter them on the heads of all of the people; and the remainder of them I will slay with the sword. He who flees of them shall not get away, and he who escapes of them shall not be delivered.

²Though they dig into Sheol (Hades, the dark abode of the gathered dead), from there shall My hand take them; though they climb up to heaven [the abode of light], from there will I bring them down;

³And though they hide themselves on the top of [Mount] Carmel, from there I will search out and take them; and though they [try to] hide from My sight at the bottom of the sea, there I will command the serpent and it shall bite them.

⁴And though they go into captivity before their enemies, there will I command the sword and it shall slay them, and I will set My eyes upon them for evil and not for good.

⁵The Lord God of hosts, it is He Who touches the earth and it melts, and all who dwell in it mourn; it shall rise like the [river] Nile, all of it, and it shall sink again like the Nile of Egypt.

⁶It is He Who builds His upper chambers in the heavens and Who founds His vault over the earth, Who calls to the waters of the sea and pours them out on the face of the earth–The Lord is His name.

⁷You [O degenerate children of Israel] are no more to Me than these [despised] Cushites, says the Lord. I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, but have I not [also] brought the Philistines out of Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir?

⁸Behold, the eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom [of Israel's ten tribes] and I will destroy it from the surface of the ground, except that I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, says the Lord.

⁹For behold, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations and cause it to move to and fro as grain is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least kernel fall upon the earth and be lost [from My sight].

¹⁰All the sinners of My people shall die by the sword, who say, The evil shall not overtake or meet [and assail] us.

¹¹In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David, the fallen hut or booth, and close up its breaches; and I will raise up its ruins, and I will build it as in the days of old,

¹²That they may possess the remnant of Edom and of all the nations that are called by My name, says the Lord Who does this.

¹³Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine and all the hills shall melt [that is, everything heretofore barren and unfruitful shall overflow with spiritual blessing].

¹⁴And I will bring back the exiles of My people Israel, and they shall build the waste cities and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards and drink the wine from them; they shall also make gardens and eat the fruit of them.

¹⁵And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be torn up out of their land which I gave them, says the Lord your God. — Amplified Bible

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Climate Witchcraft and Post-Normal Science

From American Thinker.Com

July 28, 2011

By Norman Rogers

French philosophers invented deconstructionism and postmodernism, or the theory that nothing means what it says.  Followers of these ideas are adept at finding hidden messages of capitalist oppression in the most unexpected places.  A related ideological disturbance is post-normal science.  Post-normal scientists favor relaxing scientific rigor in order to better pursue political goals.  Those goals often involve  a reorganization of society that will elevate the importance of scientists.  Archimedes supposedly said, Give me a long enough lever and I can move the world. The post-normal scientists think that science is a lever that can be used to rule the world.

Certain important climate scientists are very eager to reorganize society.  They proclaim, on weak evidence, that the Earth is doomed by global warming unless we follow a green plan to remake the economy and the social order.  We have to give up cars for trolleys.  Windmills will become ubiquitous.  The most famous climate scientist, James Hansen, wants to put his opponents on trial for crimes against humanity.^[i] Implicit in all this is the idea that a central committee of  Dr. Strangeloves should rule the world.  Instead of prince this and duke that, we will have doctor this and doctor that.  These radical intellectuals secretly despise the present system of rule by the rabble, otherwise known as democracy.

Some intellectuals think that they don’t get attention and status commensurate with their importance.  This is especially true in America, where the cleaning lady or plumber is inclined to treat them as equals.  One way to be important is to proclaim a theory that something very bad is going to happen.  If the theory has some scientific basis and is backed by other prominent scientists, the claims will be credible.

A lot of this doomsday science, disguised as environmental concern, has been going around during the last 50 years.  Global warming is just the latest example of ideologically motivated catastrophe theory.  James Delingpole’s book, Watermelons, describes the phenomenon in amusing detail.  Like radical environmentalists, watermelons are green on the outside and red on the inside.

If it weren’t for the prophecies of doom, climate science would be an obscure academic niche.  Global warming has made everyone in the field rich, at least in academic currency if not dollars.  The wealth has spread to other academic niches that have become more important in light of connections to  climate.  Global warming is a huge bonanza for the do-good environmental organization industry.  Organizations like the Sierra Club or the Environmental Defense Fund^[ii] need a perpetual stream of impending environmental disasters.  When the public becomes bored with an impending disaster that never materializes, a new impending disaster must be found.

Climate science has embraced computer climate models as the tool it uses to compute the magnitude of the warming effect of CO₂.  The climate models are riddled with problems.  Kevin Trenberth, a noted climate scientist and a prominent promoter of global warming alarmism, said this about the models: “none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate.”  The effect of CO₂ is measured by a theoretical number called climate sensitivity.  There are more than 20 climate modeling groups around the world.  These groups each spend millions on programmers and supercomputers, searching for the value of climate sensitivity.  They all get different answers, differing by a ratio of more than two to one.  This failure of consensus would normally be considered a sign that the approach is not working.  But if climate science can’t make predictions of doom, it will cease to be important and funding will collapse.  The climate science establishment had to relax the normal rules of science for its own survival and for the sake of its post-normal-science political goals.

The global warming establishment devised a solution.  They decided to take the average of the various disagreeing models and claim that the average is closer to the truth than any of the models incorporated in the average.  They call this a multi-model ensemble.  The skeptic will ask if averaging together the results from more modeling groups makes the result better, why not spend a few billion dollars more and establish another 20 or 50 modeling groups to still better zero in on the truth?  To read the justifications for multi-model ensembles is to enter a reality distortion field.

The climate models make predictions that cannot be tested because you would have to wait 50 or 100 years to see if the predictions are correct.  The models are evaluated and calibrated by simulating the observed climate of the 20^th century.  The entirely unjustified assumption is made that if the models can match the 20^th-century climate they must be working well and will be able to predict the future.  This is known as backtesting.  The problem with backtesting is that models may fit the historical data for the wrong reasons.  If a model is complicated, with enough adjustable parameters, it may be capable of fitting almost anything.  Many people have devised stock market models that work well when tested against history.  If such models could predict the future movement of markets or pick winning stocks it would be far easier to make money in the stock market than it is.

The climate models have dozens of adjustable parameters.  Inputs to the models, related to physical drivers of climate, are highly uncertain.  For example, one input is aerosols or reflective particles injected into the air from smokestacks and natural sources.  These have an effect on climate but the historical aerosol record is difficult to quantify.  We don’t know very accurately how much and what kind of aerosols there were year by year in the 20^th century, and we don’t know what the effect on the energy flows was.  In order to model the 20^th century, you must supply the model with a historical record of the effect of aerosols.  Since this is poorly known you might be tempted to fabricate the historical record so as to make the model fit the 20^th century better.^[iii] This is either a clever strategy or circular reasoning.  Climate scientists call this the inverse method of computing the effects of aerosols.^[iv] Ocean heat storage provides another example of a necessary but poorly known aspect of climate models.  Adjusting the internal model parameters related to this effect provides another lever for making a model fit the historical climate of the 20^th century.  The unfortunate result is that different climate models treat ocean heat storage quite differently, but the Earth has only one way of treating ocean heat storage.^[v]

The International Panel on Climate Change, otherwise known as the IPCC, or perhaps as the Vatican of climate change, has an established procedure for making predictions using multi-model ensembles.  Each of the modeling groups is instructed to fit or calibrate its model to the 20^th century and then to run the model into the 21^st century to get a prediction of the future.  Each group is directed to use inputs as it deems appropriate for the 20^th-century fitting.^[vi] The modeling groups can independently adopt their own set of assumptions about the reality of the 20^th-century climate.  It’s like the parallel Earths, in parallel universes, often seen in science fiction.  There is only one Earth.  There are no parallel universes.

The net result from these tricks is that fitting the models to the 20^th century becomes an exercise in curve-fitting implemented by custom fudging with a different fudge recipe at each modeling laboratory.  The result of this exercise in inventing historical data is illustrated by the figure below from the 2007 IPCC report.

The ensemble mean fits the observed temperature history^[vii] very well, even taking dips when volcanos erupt and inject cooling aerosols.  The only place where the fit fails is the early-20^th-century warming from 1910 to 1940.  The problem during that period is that there is nothing plausible to explain this early warming that is also consistent with the doctrine that CO₂ is the only cause of the late-century warming.   Most of the modelers assume that the early warming is due to a change in the sun’s output, but they don’t dare go too far with that because in general they have to minimize the effect of the sun and maximize the effect of CO₂ to avoid giving comfort to the skeptic school that thinks climate is controlled mostly by the sun.

Multiple runs of the same model are included in the graph.  Slightly different starting conditions are used for runs using the same model, so the results of different runs by the same model are not identical, and in fact exhibit considerable chaotic variation.  The chaotic or random variations average out to a characteristic climate associated with that model, if enough runs from the same model are averaged.  The interesting fact about the graph is that the 13 different models, averaged, give an excellent fit to the temperature history even though we know that the models disagree sharply on the effect of the rapidly rising CO₂ in the second half of the 20^th century.^[viii]

The apparent good performance of the models in the graph is a consequence of stacking the deck by adjusting the assumptions about the Earth independently for each model.  That adding more models to the mix makes the graph fit the observed climate better, as the IPCC claims, is an elementary result of curve fitting theory.  If you use several different curve-fitting methods (e.g., different models) and the errors in the fits are random or uncorrelated, then the errors are reduced proportional to the square root of the number of fits averaged together.  This has nothing to do with climate.  It is a mathematical and statistical result.  Of course all this is well-known to climate scientists.

Why would the IPCC use such an unscientific scheme for predicting the future climate?  A better scheme comes easily to mind.  Why not have a contest to pick the best model?  The conditions of the test against the 20^th-century observed climate should be set strictly so that inputs are the same for all models and non-physical or physically inconsistent assumptions internal to the models would be prohibited.  Although this scheme would hardly be guaranteed to result in reliable predictions of the future climate, it would surely be sounder than the corrupt scheme currently used.

But, wait a minute.  If one laboratory out of 20 was picked as having the best model, what would the reaction of the other 19 laboratories be?  After all, one can assume that the other 19 labs have 19 times the political influence that the winning lab would have.  Wouldn’t the other labs be deeply worried that their funding would be cut or diverted to the winning lab?  Suppose the winning lab was an American lab.  Might the European labs suspect cheating or bias?  Suppose a French lab won.  What would the Americans think?  Would the Congress support research at a French lab, at the expense of the American labs?  Obviously, a climate model shootout would break the unity of the climate science establishment and is thus unthinkable.

Climate models are useful heuristic tools that help in understanding climate.  Most of the work done in developing models is honest.  But the models are not remotely good enough to make predictions about the future climate under the influence of CO₂.  The IPCC and its allies have created a bizarre scheme to force doomsday predictions out of the disagreeing models in order to pursue bureaucratic and political goals.  The resultant predictions are looking very foolish in the face of 14 years of no general climate warming, and of no ocean warming since a reliable monitoring system was deployed in 2003.

President Eisenhower anticipated post-normal science in his 1961 farewell address when he warned that public policy could become the captive of the scientific-technological elite.  We are accustomed to various special interest groups cooking the books to promote their interests in Washington.  We don’t expect the science establishment to be cooking the science, but that is what is happening.  The arrogance and irresponsibility exhibited by the science establishment is quite amazing.  It will take a while for the public to adjust to the idea that organized science is as corrupt as the trial lawyers or the teachers’ union.

Norman Rogers is a Senior Policy Advisor at the Heartland Institute and maintains a personal website.

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^[i] NPR’s Diane Rehm Show on June 23, 2008

^[ii] The name was changed temporarily to Environmental Defense, Inc. until they realized that ED stands for Erectile Dysfunction and the name was changed back to Environmental Defense Fund.

^[iii] Remarked on in: Quantifying climate change – too rosy a picture?  Stephen E.  Schwartz, Robert J.  Charlson & Henning Rodhe.  Nature Reports Climate Change Published online: 27 June 2007.  Also discussed for the 2001 IPCC report in: Kiehl, J.  T.  (2007), Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity, Geophys.  Res.  Lett., 34 (2007)

^[iv] The use of the inverse method is openly discussed in the 2007 IPCC science report, section 9.2.1.2

^[v] Raper, S.C.B., J.M.  Gregory, and R.J.  Stouffer, 2002: The role of climate sensitivity and ocean heat uptake on AOGCM transient temperature response, J.  Climate, 15, 124-130.  See also the poster: Inter-model climate sensitivity, J.T.  Kiehl and C.A.  Shields NCAR.

^[vi] The WCRP CMIP3 Multimodel Dataset A New Era in Climate Change Research by Gerald A.  Meehl and others.  Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS September 2007)

^[vii] The temperature history is itself dubious as it incorporates many fudge factors and the surface temperature record from weather stations disagrees in important respects with the satellite temperature record.

^[viii] Of course global temperature is only one dimension of climate, but the most mentioned.  The full representation of global temperature includes the temperature on a grid covering the earth.  Likewise for many other climate variables, for example precipitation.

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